Starship Repo Ch. 14.5-15

Starship Repo is NOT an erotica story. If it ever gets completed, it will be a Science Fiction novel intended to be suitable for mainstream publication. This is also only Draft 0.5 since it is incomplete, so while it is fairly clean with spelling and grammar, it will likely see major changes before a ‘final draft’ ever comes about. I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 14 Continued

There was a long beat of silence on the comm. “No, stop,” the other pilot said, his voice bland and deadpan. “You’re not supposed to do that. Let us kill you.” The Void Scream didn’t start moving.

“Well, that’s one that I don’t need to care about… yet,” she mumbled to herself. “Just another seven to go.”

Unfortunately, the other seven were starting to respond. The next two on her plotted line were hovering about two hundred yards off of each other, and based on the builds of the ships they were either some sort of symbiote system that worked in unison, or they were just built by the same species and happened to enter orbit next to each other. Either way, Emerald could see the turbo laser turrets starting to track towards the SolaRepo and she cut a swooping dive to port, letting the ship rotate to keep the gunners guessing which way she would cut out of the manoeuvre.

She didn’t cut out, though, and instead headed straight towards the smaller of the two ships. Right at the bridge port gleaming out of the black hull, reflecting the light from the light from the system sun. She imagined a coterie of pirates ducking as she skimmed within metres of the ship's nose, adjusting at the last moment to run belly to belly with the ship before she slung the tug around towards its side, dodging the barrels of the same turrets she’d been avoiding tracking her.

The SolaRepo shot out passed the other end of the ship like a stone from a slingshot, washed for a moment in the exhaust of the other ship’s engines as they fired up to try and clear space between them. Emerald let out a grunt and a heavy breath as she pushed the tug to its limit, cutting the engines for a moment and using the attitude adjusters to spin her nose down towards her next target, jamming the engine throttle back to full and feeling her stomach churning as the inertia in her near-real gravity bubble threw her body against her restraints.

The wave of laser fire washed across her engine trail, tracking the direction she’d been headed, but she wasn’t there. The next volley was foiled by a looping manoeuvre that mimicked what she’d done before the pair of ships, but this time she cut hard to starboard.

And then she was up on the next obstacle - and boy was it a big one. 

The immense structure of the old mining ship looked a little like a crustacean, with five metal armatures with pincers to grab and hold big asteroids, moons or even small planetoids. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller cable-like arms floated in the space between the major arms, clustered together and tipped with what she assumed was a variety of clamps, laser drills and sonic generators all designed to tear apart space rock. And all capable of turning the SolaRepo into scrap.

Emerald couldn’t imagine where in space the pirates had found a working Moon Ripper and been able to make off with it. The thing was probably worth more than a colonised, habitable mid-Rim moon, and if it somehow managed to get its claws on a capital ship it could literally tear it in two. Whichever MegaCorp had owned it would be hunting with every tool in their belt for the thing.

“Now that would be a repo job,” Emerald muttered, just thinking of the percentage profit for a moment. Then she had to cut a hard turn, spinning around the lower starboard arm of the megalithic starship as the deadly cord arms started to move and track towards her. This brought her into the sight lines of the defensive turrets studded along the length of the arm, but better those than the mining equipment or the big grav-well designed to suck all the rock and minerals into the bowels of the ship for processing.

The defensive turrets started firing almost immediately, but Emerald’s split-second guess had been right - they weren’t individually manned emplacements with gunners able to adjust and make predictive guesses, they were being run via an algorithmic program designed to protect the ship from asteroid strikes, not small craft. In a proper space battle, the thing could dump out sheets of laserfire that would wipe out entire fighter squadrons or overwhelm the shields of small gunships. This close, however, and keeping the SolaRepo dancing, the algorithms designed to track and predict the movement of asteroids couldn’t keep up.

It was still potentially deadly - one slip would probably overload the shields, and a second would punch a hole in the ship that couldn’t be patched. The only saving grace was that the other ships in the fleet stopped firing because no one wanted to hit the big starship with a broadside.

Emerald could feel the sweat building on her face and under her flight suit as she spent the next fifteen seconds flying the old tug like it was a Carringian Four-Winged Swallow, speeding and dancing down the length of the arm until she had the shortest line towards the next ship on her route. She had no time to think, no time to analyse - all she had was instinct and her gut to keep the SolaRepo flying.

Somehow, she reached her eject point with only a couple of grazes to the shields - that was enough to have burned them to fifty per cent capacity, and she used a jet of the nose attitude adjusters to spin the tug on end and rocket away from the mining vessel.

The next minute was almost more harrowing than the last, somehow. She waltzed the SolaRepo through the waves of laser fire coming from the mining ship and managed to use the oncoming gunships to her advantage, forcing it to stop firing or risk damaging its allies. That didn’t help with the fire coming from the gunships, of course.

The ship took a few more blasts on the shields, making her wince hard and grimace as she felt something shift, just minutely, in the response of her controls. Lights were blinking at her from the control panels but she didn’t have time to check them, let alone to fix anything.

She rolled the tug, jamming right between the gunships and into the kill zone. Gunships came in three types and two categories, Capitol-killers and Fighter-killers. A fighter-killer had dozens of smaller emplacements, better able to track the flight of smaller starships to blast them out of the sky and short-range missile pods that could flood an area of space with explosions and shrapnel. Thankfully, neither of the gunships were that kind or Emerald, Widget and Brick would already be dead. Capitol class-killers came in two forms, long-range torpedo launchers designed for ambushes or firing from the edge of a battlezone, and short-range brawlers with heavy armour and heavy turbolasers.

She had one of each of those, and flying between them should have been a death sentence, but despite their big guns, heavy shielding and torpedoes that could pierce a capitol ship’s defences, Emerald had a trick up her sleeve.

It took two buttons and a flick of her wrist, to arm and fire the mag-grapnels. They shot out, the heavy duty cording unspooling rapidly as Emerald banked and spun under the first guns. She didn’t hear the clamps, but she saw the green lights of a successful maglock a moment before the cords reached their limits and the SolaRepo felt like it hit a brick wall and she was thrown forward against her seat harness by the arrested inertia.

The ship didn’t actually stop, it just hit major drag and the engines roared in protest as it pulled.

And the gunships found themselves getting pulled by their noses. Towards each other.

She dragged them for five seconds, enough time for the panic to wash over the pilots and for them to figure out what was happening and how to counteract it, before she cut the lines. The Repo shot forward again immediately, two maglocks down again, but leaving the gunships wheeling haphazardly in her wake and their guns definitely thrown off. If she was lucky there might be a collision, but she didn’t have time to keep track of them.

She had the planet in front of her, a big ball of grey and blue except for the one green landmass that was apparently her only way to save them, even if it was infested with some alien species that would also want to murder them.

The only problem was that, while there weren’t any more pirate ships ahead of her and she’d left chaos in her wake, somehow having managed to split the difference between reckless and dead, the aft sensors were showing a wash of new targets.

The pirates had launched fighter squadrons.

She had a lead, but not a big one.

This was going to be tight.

The next few minutes were silent and bone-chilling, pierced by two moments of loud klaxons warning of impending death. Most of the time all she could do was watch the sensors as the wave of little red blips slowly crawled closer on the screen while at the same time getting wider, spreading out to make sure she couldn’t hope to break around the planet and head for open space - she wasn’t even sure that the pirates didn’t have a ship covering the dark side of the planet for just that eventuality. 

The first warning rang in her ears as the torpedo came out of the dark of space like a dark, dull knife. Pitch black and capable of bouncing sensors until it was close to its target, it felt like someone had decided they really wanted the SolaRepo to go boom because it was a torpedo designed to crack the hull of a capital-class starship. She had a split second to wonder if maybe her mag-drag trick had caused more damage than she’d hoped and she’d pissed off that long-range gunship before she had to dodge the silent killer. The torpedo attempted to adjust course, lighting up the sensor board even more as its attitude adjusters engaged and it gave itself away, but the tug was still a small target compared to its usual prey and it overshot, skimming about two kilometres along before it burst into a brilliant white and green against the upper atmosphere of the planet.

The second warning siren rang off when three blips on the sensors suddenly leapt forward, closing the distance fast.

“Coolant-suckers,” Emerald grunted, grimacing as the speedy Interceptors closed the distance. Starfighters were quick and nimble, but not all of them were built the same. Some were downright lumbering and as slow as the Tug, carrying around magazines of torpedoes, missiles or even bombs that could be dropped in atmo. Others were built as light and fast as possible - their first pass wouldn’t be likely to shoot the SolaRepo out of space, but they could pick it apart like pack predators taking down big game.

Emerald flipped on the active sensors and directed them down toward the planet. It made it that much easier for the pirates to pinpoint her location, but she needed to know what was down there. Where she could try and put down and hide for a bit.

And where her sister’s ship might have crashed.

The first pass of the interceptors brought with them a series of jolts through the ship as they unloaded with their light blasters. Emerald growled in frustration, not even bothering to power up the single defensive blaster because it would never be able to track the speedy fighters. They soared past her and began a slow loop around to come at her from the side next. 

Emerald opened an open comm chanel. “Any of you guys feel like givin’ it a break here?”

“Sure, Tug,” someone replied. “Let’s all stop for lunch. You lock into orbit, and we’ll spacewalk over if you’re offering a hot meal.”

“I think your hot meal is waiting back for you on your ships,” Emerald mumbled absentmindedly as she kept one eye on her active sensors as they read the topography of the continent ahead of her. No major technological hot spots, so no cities. No minor ones either, it looked like. No sign of why the pirates were on the moon and not the planet - it looked verdant. Lush, even. And the air was likely breathable to about 67% of standard species in the cluster, 94% with basic rebreather apparatuses.

“I’ll make you a deal, Tug,” another of the pirates spoke up. They finished their turns and closed with her again. “You sit still for one second and we’ll tuck you in nice and peaceful like.”

“Did you guys know your wingmate was that creepy, or is this news to you?” she asked. Then she banked hard, starting up a new set of juking evasive manoeuvres that would have been a lot more effective in a fighter than the boat she was piloting.

The effort was only partially effective and the ship shuddered as more energy sts washed across her shield, nibbling away at the power.

Then, blessedly, she hit the atmosphere and she had a moment to think. Entering atmo was a bit of an ordeal - you had to come in at the right angle, and for a short amount of time you couldn’t really manoeuvre too much, and definitely not like the interceptors would want to do. The immense heat caused by the friction of entry into most atmospheres could tear a ship apart if you were too cavalier.

Emerald turned all her attention to the scanners for the relative moment of peace as the Repo shuddered and jolted through entry and the cockpit view filled with the fire of the gases compressing and radiation mixing, turning them into a burning comet above the planet. If there were some savage people down there, Emerald could only assume she looked like some primal portent of doom.

Then again, if the pirates really were afraid to land on the surface, maybe she was just ringing the dinner bell.

The scanners found technology, hunting for the telltale signs of power sources. Three sites across the entire damn continent. Two were so vague they might have been depleted batteries from whenever that moon base got built. The third was a shipwreck.

A little before the ship computer acknowledged it was safe, Emerald was banking in the direction of the wreck.

“You’re making a mistake, SolaRepo,” one of the pirates called over the comm. “Better to just let us blast you into atoms up here than deal with the Hunters down there.”

“Sounds like someone’s been listening to old wives’ tales,” Emerald shot back, checking her sensors. The Interceptors hadn’t come into atmo even though they were perfectly capable of doing so. Instead, they were tracking above her, following her route. The umbrella of fighters spread out over a third of the planet, still closing in. “I always heard filthy, stinking pirates were superstitious little quarks.”

“Ain’t superstition if you’ve seen the gnawed on bones,” another pirate chuckled darkly over the comm.

The Repo passed over a chain of mountains, most of which were covered in the same thick jungle as the rest of the region, and Emerald spotted the wreck on the horizon. It was still smoking four or five days after it went down, and as she got closer she could see that the UEN Vapour Mist had come down at an angle and skidded through a half kilometre of jungle, carving a deep gouge in the landscape as parts of it broke off and scattered with the impact. She made out an engine housing about a third of the way up, and what looked like a transport shuttle that had been ejected from its docking bay and thrown like a child’s toy, landing upside down and crumpling under its own weight. The main hull was big, scarred and pitted full of holes, but still recognizable as a UEN design with its sleek, curving lines where those lines still held together. 

And, as she got closer, like an insect swarm crawling over a carcass, she saw people. Humans, or near-humans, though she couldn’t see details, and for a moment her heart thundered in her chest that Ruby was alive. Another kilometre closer though, crossed in seconds, dropped that surge into the pit of her stomach.

The people weren’t wearing UEN uniforms. They didn’t seem to be wearing much at all, their uniformly tanned skin bare to the sun. And they weren’t doing repairs, they were stripping the ship. Hammering at it with tools, peeling back layers of hull and hauling them to some sort of beast of burden.

“Here comes the show,” one of the pirates said.

Emerald banked Repo hard, dropping into a curving dive to starboard, based purely on that warning. If she hadn’t, the warning klaxon that went off would have been too late.

She only saw the massive boulder after it had passed over the ship, arcing silently through the air like it was on an anti-grav sledge.

“What the-?” she mumbled, and spotted three more of them flying through the air towards her. No, not three, a dozen. An entire volley of boulders half the size of the Repo, flying through the air towards her from three different angles.

Emerald’s butt clenched tighter than a mag lock as she realised that maybe she really did need to worry less about the pirates and more about the savages.

Chapter 15

System: RZX22.84 Unnamed

Planet: G9743.208CP Unnamed

Lunar Base of Pirate Admiral Mirax Money

“It’ll piss off your father,” Rake said.

That got Mindial’s attention. “What did you say?”

“Breaking her out will piss him off,” Rake repeated himself. “That’s why you’re doing this, right? Saving me and my crew. It’s because he’s telling you to do something that you don’t agree with, again. He doesn’t listen, doesn’t care and doesn’t ever agree with you. Am I close?”

“You don’t know anything about me, Rake Solar,” Mindial sneered, but the look was covering something else.

“I might not know, but I can guess,” Rake said. “And I’m thinking you’ve got a whole damn lot of the same problems that I do with ‘family’ and fathers. Look at me - you think I want to be a repo man? You’re already pulling the trigger on rebelling against him, why not add all the fuel to the fire you can?”

Mindial growled in her chest and looked back over at Ruby in her cell. The redheaded woman was trying to put up a stoic face, but she was clenching her jaw on one side just like Emerald did and Rake knew she was biting her tongue.

“Fine,” Mindial finally exhaled, stepping towards the cell door. She held out her key card but stopped about a foot from the lock, holding it up and locking eyes with Ruby. “Don’t try anything funny, UEN. I’m the only one who’s going to get you out of here.”

Ruby grimaced and nodded.

“Uh-uh,” Mindial shook her head. “You need to say it, UEN. Use your words.”

“I promise not to try anything funny,” Ruby grunted, crossing her arms over her chest. “Happy now?”

“Like a space bat latched onto an exposed rad line,” Minidial said, then swiped the card and popped open the cell.

For a moment, Rake had a serious worry that Ruby might try to jump Mindial. The pirate’s friends and allies had killed many, if not most, of Ruby's crewmates and shot down her ship. And Mindial was keenly aware of this - her hand not holding the card was demurely tucked behind her back, lifting up the back of her leather jacket and holding the hilt of a knife.

There was a long, tense moment as Ruby stepped out of the cell, more fully under the light. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it back from her face, and then exhaled hard and fast. “What now?”

“Now, we need to disappear for a bit,” Mindial said. “After we get out of this cell block.”

The process of getting out of the cell block was fairly simple. They closed the cell doors, and Mindial pulled out her blaster and fired twice into the empty cell where Rake had been imprisoned. Then Rake and Ruby hid behind the main vault door while Mindial knocked on the little grimy porthole with the butt of her pistol, signalling she wanted out.

Ruby stank. Rake was a little shocked at the smell. She stank of engine coolant, chemical fire and stale sweat, built up over days since her ship went down. Her ripped and torn uniform, the haphazard bandages, and the telltale smudges of grease and filth on her knuckles, under her nails and at the corners of her face. All of it built into this more solid picture of what she’d been through that he hadn’t been able to see in the dim light between the cells.

And yet, he knew that jawline. He knew that arch to her upper lip, and the shape of her nose. He knew those eyes, even, as she met his for a moment and then turned back to watch Mindial as the lock started to spin on the heavy door. Ruby was the same height as Emerald and had the same vibrant red hair even if it was cut differently. And she was beautiful like Emerald. Rake could have almost mistaken her for his pilot, but the scar wasn’t there. The scar that had ended Emerald’s career as the UEN’s recruitment poster girl, as far as he knew.

It was so strange, feeling like he had to protect this woman with his life even though he’d never met her before the cells.

The vault door opened with its heavy cla-clunk, and Mindial grunted. “Get in here, slimeball,” she said in a commanding tone. “Grab the body.”

“What?” the slug-like guard outside complained. “I’m here guarding the brig. I ain’t no janitor bot.”

“Are you defying a direct order?” Mindial growled.

The slug pirate grumbled and slid his way in through the bulkhead door, only stopping once he’d turned and Mindial had raised her blaster, flicking a switch on it as the laser started a high pitched hum.

“Overcharged,” she said. “It’ll vaporise all the important bits before you can start growing them back.”

The pirate, now facing Ruby and Rake and seeing that they were free, swallowed nervously. “You thought this through here, Captain?” he asked.

“I’ve thought about it enough,” Mindial answered.

“You gonna kill me?” he asked.

“Not unless you give me a reason to,” Mindial said. She pulled his blaster from its holster, along with the wicked-looking truncheon hanging from his belt. Then she gave him a shove with her free hand, making sure to push on his clothed shoulder and not his sticky, slimy skin. “Get in the cell.”

He went without complaint, slithering in and turning as the cell door clanged closed again and she locked it with the key card. Mindial pocketed it.

“When they find you,” she said. “Tell my father he’s got brain rot, and I’m doing this for my mother.”

The slug, whose features were so non-humanoid it was difficult to read, somehow made it clear what he thought of that particular message.

“You’ll tell him that exactly,” Mindial growled.

“He’ll kill me,” the slug pleaded.

“If I find out you don’t, I’ll come for you and kill you myself,” Mindial sneered. “So you decide which risk to take.” She turned to Ruby, handing her the other blaster. Rake was about to complain but then Ruby quickly did a spot check of the weapon in the sort of methodical, regimented way that only someone very familiar with firearms could. He bit his tongue and accepted the truncheon, trying not to let the slimy end of it touch his pants. “Come on,” Mindial said. “We’ve probably got minutes before my father thinks to send someone down here looking for me if your crew’s managed to escape. We need to disappear.”

“You know a place down here they wouldn’t look?” Ruby asked.

“I grew up on this base,” Mindial said with a sad smirk as she led them out of the brig and yanked the big vault door closed. “One little kid without a friend on the entire moon. I know every nook and cranny of this stars-forgotten pit. We can probably avoid them for a few days at least, as long as we can gather some supplies. That should be enough time to figure out a proper plan for how we get to my ship.”

“Your crew will side with you?” Rake asked, slipping in behind Mindial as she started to skulk down one of the dimly lit corridors. 

“They wouldn’t hand you over to your father?” Ruby tacked on, falling in behind Rake.

“Enough of them will side with me,” Mindial murmured. “Maybe just enough, but it’ll do. The real question is whether we can get to them or not. We’ve got a lot of vacuum between us and freedom here. So shut up and follow me.”

An alarm, distant and echoing down the tunnels, started to howl.

“Make that seconds, not minutes.”

- - - - -

The moon base was a maze. Rake had already realised that during his first trip through the dark, dry corridors but as he, Ruby and Minidal had fled through the dark tunnels. He had to trust that Mindial really did know the place like the back of her hand because there were times when they were running in almost pitch dark, trusting her alien eyes to bring them through without running into a wall or any of the detritus that was stacked and left to sit.

“What is this place?” Rake panted as Mindial slowed down. They’d been running for a good ten minutes, and he was trying not to think of the fact that his family, and his ship, were either down on the planet or space dust by then.

“As far as I know, there aren’t any records dating back to whenever it was first built,” Mindial said, breathing deeply as she put a hand on the wall. She’d stopped them in a room that shot off from one of the smaller corridors, the space lined with pipes and ancient equipment terminals, their screens cracked and dark. It could have been some sort of utility control room that barely anyone ever entered back then or a line of computers where people had worked every hour of the day - it was impossible for Rake to tell. “The best guesses I’ve heard from some of the more intelligent of the crews over the years is that it was some kind of training outpost back during one of the big imperial expansion wars. It’s the only thing that explains the big hangers and barracks facilities, and why half the planet down there is an irradiated wasteland. They probably ran training bombing runs or tested weapons down there.”

“It’s Nuthonian,” Ruby said.

“What?” Mindial asked.

“The base,” Ruby sighed, standing up from where she’d couched and put her back against the wall. “It's Nuthonian. They were a species that was almost as widespread as humans at one point. Aggressive, too. Their home turf was in the Pin-3 Cluster, and this would have been one of their forward operating bases when they tried to start conquering the Zolani Cluster.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

She shrugged, gesturing at her torn uniform. “We were a science vessel, but half of science is trying to figure out the stuff that’s been forgotten. Some academics at some UEN University in the Core came across a reference to this place in some ancient report and put it on the big list of places for a ship like ours to check out. We made stops at abandoned facilities like this constantly, out on the fringes of the cluster. They were almost always abandoned for a reason, and stripped of anything of scientific or monetary value long before we got there. Nuthonians were insectoid and could space walk without a suit briefly, so they preferred colonising moons and planets without atmo.”

“If they were so big, what happened to them?” Mindial asked. “I’ve never even heard of them and I’ve been to Pin-3.”

“I’m not a historian, but from what I picked up, someone got fed up with them and manufactured a plague,” Ruby shrugged. “One century they were an expansionist empire, the next they’d been wiped from the face of the galaxy. This place probably got used during the more recent wars as a temporary base, maybe even a fuel or supplies depot, if it wasn’t full of insectoid corpses when you pirates first found it.”

“I haven’t ever heard something like that from the old timers,” Mindial grimaced. Then she sucked in a breath through her nose and let it out with a grunt. “Doesn’t matter who built it a millennia ago or whatever, we need to get off of it, and that means getting closer to the actual living areas and all three of us will get spotted out immediately. We need food and supplies, and we need disguises.”

Rake nodded, glancing at the strange, barren room again and trying to imagine a line of insect people working at the consoles. It was hard to picture. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get supplies, right?” he asked. “It looked like they’re just kept out in the open.”

“Once we’re there, no, not a problem,” Mindial said. “The problem is getting to them, and making it back out. There are a few chokepoints in the base that my Father would have already put guards at, all told to watch for us.”

“So we’re stuck,” Ruby grimaced. “You ran us into what is basically just a bigger cell.”

“No, UEN,” Mindial said. “It just means we’ve got limited options.”

“I don’t know if two blasters and a club are going to help us attack a guarded chokepoint,” Rake said. “Especially if they can see us coming.”

“That’s why we’re not going to attack the chokepoints,” Mindial said, pointedly looking down the room at the thick pipes. “We’re going to go over them.”